
Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. He covers Jewish religious organizations, synagogue life, anti-Semitism and the Orthodox world. If you have any tips, you can email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @aefeldman.
Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. He covers Jewish religious organizations, synagogue life, anti-Semitism and the Orthodox world. If you have any tips, you can email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @aefeldman.
Mindel Zaetz’s husband was chased down the street last week by a group of men while he was on his way home from work, just off of Eastern Parkway, the broad thoroughfare that runs through the middle of Crown Heights, in Brooklyn. “He came home really spooked,” said Zaetz, 29, as she was on her…
See the helicopter, hovering low above a grassy field ringed with children jonesing for a sugar rush. Watch pounds and pounds of gelt — chocolate coins in metallic foil — dumped out of said helicopter. Observe the children descend on the fallen gelt like Israelites on manna from heaven. If you happen to be in…
In The Face Of Tragedy, Act With Humanity The day after the Pittsburgh massacre, Dr. Jeffrey Cohen went to see the man who had killed his friends. Cohen, 63, is a member of the Tree of Life synagogue, and is president of Allegheny General Hospital, where Robert Bowers, the shooter, was taken for treatment. Two…
Choosing Peace Before Politics Rabbi Jeffrey Myers was introduced to the world in a photograph of him being rushed away from the Tree of Life synagogue, with a talit over one shoulder, clutching his kippah to his head. He quickly became the face of Jewish Pittsburgh, speaking at length to the media and eventually taking…
What does Rabbi Aviad Bodner, leader of Manhattan’s historic Stanton Street Shul, which seats 400, have in common with televangelist mega-preachers whose sermons reach millions of people around the world? All get a tax break on their housing costs — despite the fact that Bodner rents a two-bedroom in Manhattan’s East Village with his wife…
Joshua Rubin, a software developer from Brooklyn, has been bearing witness to the child refugee concentration camp in Tornillo, Tex., since mid-October. He sits outside its locked front gate, watching trucks carrying toilets, construction materials and children go in and out. He believes, based on estimates given to him secretly by the camp’s staff, that…
In a dusty, deserted patch of desert near the border with Mexico, inside a tent city enclosed with a giant fence, are thousands of detained children and teenagers. Just outside the locked entrance, sitting on a metal chair and holding a sign that says “FREE THEM,” is Joshua Rubin. Rubin, 67, a software developer from…
Congregation Shaarai Shomayim, in Lancaster, PA, is one of the oldest continually operating congregations in North America. Its cemetery has graves from the colonial period. Its sisterhood was founded in 1894. But when that sisterhood decided a couple years ago to try to attract younger members, they changed their name — the Temple Sisterhood became…
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